Microsoft: PC users are drowning in their ocean of information

Microsoft said that search systems must improve because with today's cheap storage technology users can record every conversation of a lifetime and decades of photos, but it's still quite hard to search through this huge amount of data.

But experts are struggling with ways to store the vast amounts of information generated over a person's lifetime and still permit them to retrieve important details later, said Rashid, who manages about 700 researchers at five labs from Beijing to San Francisco. And he acknowledged troubling privacy concerns.